What Happened the Last Time Republicans Cared About Poverty

Deeply influenced by social scientists who perceived gaps in opportunity between middle-class and affluent Americans, on one hand, and the urban and rural poor, on the other, the architects of the Great Society fashioned programs meant to help close the opportunity gap rather than effect wholesale transfers of income or wealth. By ensuring that poor families had better access to health care, education and vocational training, and jobs, liberal and moderate politicians believed they could help the poor lift themselves above the poverty line.

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These ideas weren’t particular to one party or the other. They reflected a post-war consensus that the American economy would continue to grow in perpetuity and that economists had mastered the structural flaws that created wild swings and instability in earlier decades. By this wisdom, solving poverty meant helping people over a fixed line, rather than fashioning a more equal distribution of wealth.

At the time, these assumptions seemed to make sense. In the quarter-decade following World War II, the United States experienced an economic boom that was unprecedented in its scope and size. In the 1950s median family income grew by a stunning 30 percent, while in the decade that followed, per capita income grew by 41 percent.

In the post-war years the average American transitioned from renter to homeowner, from blue-collar to white-collar worker, and from a culture of Depression-era scarcity and wartime rationing to post-war consumer abundance. Between 1950 and 1960, the average American family experienced a 330 percent hike in purchasing power, reflecting an amazing 55 percent increase in the gross national product over roughly the same period. The typical American home in the late 1950s held seven times more equipment and goods than in the 1920, and these trends continued unabated throughout the 60s. Even poor people had access to goods that would have been regarded as luxuries in leaner times.

Affluence cannot be counted in numbers alone. By the late 1960s, most families enjoyed access to a broad range of consumer luxuries that were not even imaginable in 1945, including Polaroid cameras; hi-fi stereo systems; long-playing records; electric refrigerators and freezers; cars with automatic transmissions, tubeless tires, and power steering; shopping malls; fast food restaurants; and electricity, which 18 percent of households still lacked as recently as 1945.

Americans in the 1960s were not only affluent and comfortable, but also blessed with greater health and technology than their countrymen before them. Looking back on the early post-war years, the journalist Robert Samuelson remembered that “you were constantly treated to the marvels of the time. At school, you were vaccinated against polio. … At home, you watched television. Every so often, you looked up into the sky and saw the white vapor trails of a new jet. … There was an endless array of new gadgets and machines. No problem seemed to be beyond solution.”

There was no reason for any of this to stop. Living in this era of prosperity and wonder, Republicans like George Romney and Democrats like Lyndon Johnson agreed that such qualitative programs as education and vocational training would lift more Americans into the ranks of the middle class, which would continue to expand along with the growing economy. Such was the organizing thesis of the Great Society.

Movement conservatives sharply disagreed. Barry Goldwater, LBJ’s electoral opponent in 1964, derided LBJ as the “Santa Claus of the free lunch” (and, indeed, free and reduced-price lunches for poor school kids are a lasting legacy of the Great Society). Sounding less like George and more like Mitt Romney (or, at least, less like Mitt Romney in 2012), Goldwater argued that the “attitudes or actions” of poor people, and not context or environment, were to blame. By the 1980s, such ideas became increasingly popular. In the mid-60s, they still were not.

Today, it is impossible to imagine an America without the Great Society. Medicare and Medicaid have offered—quite literally—a lifeline to the elderly and impoverished. Local school districts rely heavily on federal aid. Head Start and school lunch programs remain widely popular, as well they should, given their profound and positive impact on disadvantaged children. But even LBJ’s most ardent fans would be hard-pressed to claim that the Great Society solved the problem of inequality.

Cash-transfer programs initiated under the New Deal were and still are more instrumental in tackling that particular problem. In 1972, the bottom 20 percent of earners took home just 1.7 percent of all income; after Social Security, unemployment and disability benefits, and AFDC, they took home 5.4 percent.

But Great Society programs didn’t dramatically alter inequality because, in fairness, they never set out to do so. They set out to close the opportunity gap and expand the safety net, and that they did.

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Ironically, the president who broke most sharply with the notion of deploying qualitative solutions to fix the opportunity gap was Richard Nixon—also a Republican. More out of disdain for federal bureaucrats than out of love for income distribution, in 1969 Nixon tried to scrap the nation’s complicated patchwork of welfare programs and replace it with a negative income tax that would guarantee all families a minimum annual income. It was an unorthodox position that met with cautious silence from most Republicans, who were loath to contradict their newly elected president, but who also had little appetite for redistributive tax policies.

Known as the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), the proposal would have streamlined the welfare state, eliminating thousands of bureaucrats and caseworkers and substituting cash transfers for services. FAP included work incentives to ensure that recipients would not lose funding if they found jobs. Had Congress passed the plan, it would have covered roughly twice as many people—and three times as many children—as the principal government welfare program that it was intended to replace, Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC); under FAP, federal welfare spending would have increased by $4.4 billion in its first year of enactment.

But FAP proved a no-starter. It won accolades from many people on the left, who admired its aggressive approach to tackling poverty, and from many on the right, who believed that the working poor knew how to spend their money better than social workers and public-sector bureaucrats. But a strange coalition of Southern conservatives and Northern liberals killed the legislation in Congress. Taking their cues from the National Welfare Rights Association, an advocacy group representing welfare recipients, liberals argued that the plan would not provide poor families with enough money to keep afloat. They liked the framework; they just didn’t approve of the funding formula.

At the same time, business and political elites in the South dreaded the possible ramifications of FAP. Studies estimated that the program would have covered 35 percent of Mississippi’s population, thus equalizing the earnings of the state’s black and white citizens. In Mississippi, two-thirds of black women worked in service industries. FAP would have boosted the earnings of a $40-per-week housekeeper to $3408 per year—not too far off from the average wages of a male factory worker ($3984). By raising income levels across the board, FAP threatened to destabilize race relations and increase the region’s low prevailing wage.

FAP was hardly a perfect plan. But it was also the most ambitious welfare proposal since the New Deal, and it promised to enshrine in federal law something that liberals had long wished for—a guaranteed income. Had liberal Democrats negotiated with Nixon over funding levels rather than colluded with Southern conservatives to kill the plan, millions more Americans would have enjoyed access to public assistance. More importantly, the political stigma that was later attached to AFDC—the idea that it rewarded poor men and women for not working, for not living under one roof with their children, and for not claiming personal responsibility for their lives—would have been neutralized given its built-in work incentives.